Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything
by MidnightCereal
Summary: The world's only three part one shot. More fun than getting kicked in the teeth!
1. I Have No Idea

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

* * *

**Unanimous Critical Acclaim for MidnightCereal's In the Dark Room!**

"_Even in Post-TI Tokyo-3 I am not a fan of a poorly developed ACC."_

"_Just remember the number one rule about ACCs and Pilots, and everything should be fine."_

"_DOMESTICATION OF EROTIC CAT"_

"_Egads more damn Mary Sues!"_

"_I didn't really find interest in this part of the story."_

"_Hm. So Shinji killed again in Third Impact? Hard to swallow."_

"_Oh God...I was hoping against it, given the title, but this is going to turn into some sick torturefic, isn't it? sigh"_

_"This has to be the worst fic ever...Take this fic out of the net because you will make more people sick and pissed."_

"_So, to be clear, I will never, ever, ever ever ever...ever...ask anyone to ever review my fiction. Ever."_

"_I'm only doing this because you were bitching about the number of reviews."_

* * *

Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything: I Have No Idea What You Are Talking About, So Here Is a Penguin with a Waffle On Top of Its Head

By MidnightCereal

Love.

Dedication.

Generosity.

Fidelity.

Serenity.

Patriotism.

Solidarity.

Shinji Ikari felt none of these things as he delicately clutched the remains of his only valuable material possession. Oh, people would listen to him play the cello, and applaud him and laud his hidden musical talent, but that wasn't important to him, and the young man knew better; compared to real cellists, his sessions were analogous to a thousand pregnant cats being bludgeoned by a thousand rotary phones, which was to say, he sucked. And also that rotary phones were pretty heavy and often given to jagged edges.

He needed no talent to curl into a ball of self-pity on his bed and thumb his SDAT to track number twenty-five, just a thumb. And a memory stick. And some batteries.

And a SDAT that was not in a million fucking pieces.

It didn't make any sense…he had suited up and brought it with him to relax before the briefing on today's field exercises began. He had left it intact in his seat when he went to search for a vending machine. The vending machine deducted one-hundred credits from the debit strip on his Nerv ID. The vending machine failed to dispense his apple juice, and thanked him for his patronage. He returned to the conference room only to find that his SDAT had apparently been lynched.

No, Shinji Ikari was definitely not feeling love.

The plastic and rubber and carbon composite shifted as he tensed his palm. It was like holding a mortally wounded bird, one that had been bludgeoned by a pregnant cat.

"Who…who broke my SDAT?" He did not bother to look up as the question left his chapped lips. That was quite alright, as no one in the briefing room –not Ritsuko or Maya, Hyuga or Aoba, or Rei or Commander Fuyutski- bothered looking up, either.

After about twenty seconds of being ignored he readied a louder, more direct inquiry when the door opened and something infinitely louder and more direct stormed through.

"-and you're letting them go ahead of _me_! It isn't enough that I have to work with the Queen of Dolls and King Dork over here, but now I'm backing them up?"

"For the _last_ time, Asuka," Misato warned as she came in after the petulant German, her voice weighted with all the patience of a rabid badger, "stop thinking of this as a mission, okay? It's a _field test_, and you can only go one at a time, and we picked who went first and second and last _completely_ at random!"

"If it doesn't matter, let me go first, then," Asuka whined in the periphery of Shinji Ikari's vision.

_It's in so many godforsaken pieces…_

"I am not going to wait in this…_tomb_ a second longer than I have to, Misato!"

"I am not the Queen of Dolls," someone said to his right.

"Asuka…don't be a Nazi about this," Misato darkly intoned.

The Second Child gave a gasp. "I can't believe you just _said_ that!"

"I only said it because I want you to shut up!" their loving guardian snapped. "If it's bothering you so damned much, go get Ritsuko to change the order."

"Or better yet," the blonde doctor smoothly interjected, "you just let it go and act like the adult you keep telling everyone to treat you as."

Timing had always been one of Shinji's strong suits, like marathon sex and molten glass eating.

"Um…excuse me-"

"_What_," was the response from three separate, caustic female voices.

Miraculously, the young man overcame years of programming to weakly ask, "Do you know who broke this?" He held out the grisly remains of the most important thing ever given to him.

"What the heck did you do to your SDAT?" Misato asked. Why would she even ask that? Wasn't she listening?

"_No_…it was…I came back here after getting something to drink from the vending machine, and-"

"Wait, you didn't go to the machine in block D-12, did you?" Ritsuko asked as she looked away from her digital clipboard. "Because that one's been broke for almost a month now."

"I _knew_ there was something wrong with that machine!" Major Katsuragi exclaimed. "I probably lost six-hundred credits trying to get some coffee out of that thing. Why doesn't anybody just put a sign on it?"

"Excuse me…"

"It's always like that here," Hyuga chipped in. "This place has the latest high-end computing, Super Doppler radar, six-gigawatt linear induction catapults, but no one ever bothers to take a piece of paper and just write 'out of order'."

This elicited a short laugh from Asuka. "You people are retarded, that's all that's wrong with this place."

"Look, all I want to know is-"

"Asuka, can you ever just go _five_ minutes without insulting everyone within a ten kilometer radius?" Someone tiredly asked. Shinji didn't know who. They all sounded the same at the moment.

"I'm just saying; they should let me have a go at running this place. I'd probably have that bathroom on the eighth level fixed in a day."

"Oh, I know! I _hate_ that bathroom!"

"Why does it always smell like a graham cracker my baby cousin just slobbered on?"

"I am not the Queen of Dolls."

"All I want to know is who BROKE THIS!"

Everything in the room stopped talking, stopped blinking and stopped breathing. Everything in the room snapped to the shouting, furiously blinking, heavily breathing young man.

"Look," Shinji began, feeling buffoonish and awkward now that he finally had everyone's attention. "I just want to know…I-I won't be mad. I just want someone here to be honest, _once_."

"How do you know someone here wrecked it?" Ritsuko coolly asked.

"Are you _serious_? Who else? No one else had been in here."

Someone snorted and muttered, "Probably broke it yourself, fishing for sympathy, of course." Asuka. Of course.

His free hand clenched and unclenched. Clenched and unclenched.

"That's not true...I wouldn't break it for _anyone_. And it _had_ to be someone in here. I don't want to accuse anyone, but I KNOW someone here did it and I just wish they'd own _up_ to it. I'm not stupid."

Asuka snorted again. Ritsuko smirked for some reason. A pretty young female tech turned to whisper conspiratorially to an even younger, even prettier tech. Then they grinned at him and cackled.

Clenched and unclenched.

Misato was the only one regarding Shinji with a look anywhere approaching sympathy. "Shinji…try not to worry about it for now, okay? I'll…I'll get a new one for you. We'll drive out to that new Sony outlet when the test is ov-"

"I DON'T WANT A NEW ONE! I WANT TO KNOW WHO TRASHED _THIS_ ONE!"

Asuka tensed, whirled on him. "All I want to know is why you think anyone cares! No one's thinking about you so they don't' have any reason to break it. No one's scared of you, so even if they _did_, they wouldn't have a reason not to tell you." She stomped into his personal space, her expression matching the indignation that pulled at his wide eyes and frowning mouth and creasing brow. "GET. OVER IT."

"Subtle, Asuka," Misato groused, "_real_ subtle."

"I'm just telling it like it is," the Second Child volleyed back, still virtually nose to nose with her choleric flat mate. It was odd; when the roaring tide of righteous anger and self-pity periodically subsided, something else was washing over him. Why else would he be able to stare back, unflinching?

"I don't believe I'm saying this, but…I agree with Asuka," Shinji did not hear Ritsuko say.

This thing had a new taste to it, a flavor unfamiliar to him…

_It tastes like…_

"C'mon, Shinji," the young pilot would have heard Hyuga softly appeal, had he been listening. "Be a man about this."

… _like…_

"For once," said the smirking face before him.

"Asuka, shut the hell up!"

…_like a plane crash._ But it crept through his brain like an ice-cream headache, diffusing to a bundle of nerves around his eyes…

"Why's your eye twitching?" Misato asked, regarding him as though he had his head amputated. Then her face was blanketed with an absurdly terrible recognition. "God, it's not those spiders again, _is_ it? Because I promised myself I'd never view another colonoscopy for as long as I lived…"

* * *

It is a little known fact, possibly because it's not true, that carpenter ant colonies occasionally fall victim to regicide. The culprit is almost never the Black Bear or birds or the North American Hobo, natural enemies of the carpenter ant, and the most obvious suspects. Rather, it is rogue worker ants that, for reasons known only to the author, betray her exalted segmented majesty.

In an act of cruelty found mostly in nature and short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, the traitors to the colony secrete Exocytotic Epoxy –a substance largely unknown to the scientific community due to its made-upness- which has the consistency of wood cement. Treacherous mandibles work from the edges to the center of tunnels to block off all entrances to the queen's chamber with the glue, effectively sealing her off from all sources of food, mates, and her monthly subscription to _Cosmo_.

One would think the less insane members of the colony would come to their queen's aid, which is unfortunately not true. No reason will be given for this, as the author is splitting his time in between writing this story and watching _Justice League: Unlimited_, and cannot be bothered to provide a suitable explanation. If anything, it had something to do with honey. Or perhaps marmalade, as it is the sexiest of preserves. And maybe a weasel of some sort or another got up in there but the POINT is that the queen's fate is quite literally sealed. To wit, she is screwed.

Shinji Ikari was about to screw the queen.

* * *

"I hate that thing."

Ritsuko Akagi glanced up from behind Lieutenant Ibuki to view the profile of the woman that just spoke. Standing beside Ritsuko in Central Dogma was Misato, darkly glaring at the video feed from the test cage; or rather, she was glaring at the purple behemoth slowly being loaded into launching position.

Ritsuko reminded herself she was a respected, experienced, patient professional scientist, and that responding to Misato by rolling her eyes would be exceedingly childish and serve only to infuri-

"Stop rolling your eyes at me!"

"I don't know what you're complaining about, Misato. It's not like _you_ have to get in that thing."

"Okay, so…where was this sympathy when he was asking about his SDAT?"

The blonde doctor ignored the peeved look Major Katsuragi threw her and said, "Not sympathy. I'm just stating the facts, Major. And it wasn't time for it, anyway. Compared to Eva how is his SDAT important?"

"It's important to him!" Ritsuko shrugged at that. "And if it keeps him happy it's important to _you_."

"Evangelion Unit-01 is at Route Three," Maya informed them. "Secondary, tertiary locks engaging."

Ritsuko sighed. _This is ridiculous_. "You know, I can't tell who this whole thing bothers more, you or Shinji. Since when did you become so invested in this kid?"

"I'm _not_ invested, I…" The Major folded her arms across her stomach and paused just long enough to glance upward to Commander Ikari. Even without her glasses Ritsuko could tell the man was sitting, fingers interlaced before his mouth, doing his best impression of a wax figure of himself. She wished someone would melt his ass. "There's this feeling that I got looking at Shinji, you know? I got this…this_burning_ sensation."

Dr. Akagi smirked. "I told you Kaji was screwing around with that Mido girl in Engineering."

"SHUT IT."

"There is no cure, but that doesn't mean you can't live a full and produc-"

"Not that kind of burning!"

Ritsuko noticed Makoto Hyuga exhaling for some reason. Behind him, Shigeru Aoba ate a delicious sandwich that wasn't there.

Poor Aoba. Ever since he had been struck by lightening while listening to Adam Sandler's revival comedy album, he had never been the same. The doctor at Nerv Cranial said he could return to normal if he was allowed to explore the places that had encompassed his past daily routine. The problem was that the man would perform the right task at the wrong time, as if his internal clock had been set a few hours too fast.

By Ritsuko's count, he had played his electric air guitar at the bottom of the LCL lake in test cage four, tossed a two-hundred and forty volt power transformer with a pair of copper salad tongs, and tried spelunking the underside of Unit-02's foot then argued with the chamber of a pallete rifle about the increased interest of his student loans. Ritsuko (and Second Lieutenant Takeshi Suzuki, for reasons the officer vehemently refused to elaborate on) hoped he returned to normal. And soon.

"Did someone say Kaji?"

"I wasn't being serious, AsukaaaaAAHH!" Ritsuko used the seond she took to look the Second Child up and down to regain her composure. "When did you even get in here?"

Asuka shrugged. "When did you mention Kaji? Is he here?"

"No," Ritsuko said.

"Because there is a God," Misato said.

The German girl ignored her guardian and cursed. "Damn. It's like he vanishes every other week! I call his cell phone, he doesn't pick up. He doesn't answer at home. His pager's off. His car's still parked outside of his apartment, but when I go up and knock no one ever comes to the door-"

"Maya, patch me into Unit-01," Ritsuko requested.

"-but he usually doesn't lock his windows on Sunday. Why would he lock his windows if he wanted me to come in? You know how long it takes to bypass a biometric alarm syst-"

"Shinji, when you're ready to launch, just say the word. Go through the checklist when you get to the surface-"

"-rivate eyes charge per hour. By the _hour_. I didn't know that. You can't convince me it wasn't worth it, though. I never realized it until I got all the pictures, but Kaji sure does bend over a lot for a guy."

"-and a palette rifle is going to be available in district twenty-seven and we'll take it from-"

Suddenly blue tendrils of electricity replaced Unit-01 at the base of the launch platform, the audio feed from the cage dominated by the roar of something massive rocketing upwards through twenty-three layers of armor.

"…there." Ritsuko shut her mouth and triumphantly looked at Misato. "See? He's enthusiastic today."

"He's mad at you," Major Katsuragi countered.

"Well I think you're not giving him enough credit. I think he's gotten over it."

The last Katsuragi shook her head of dark violet hair (She told her not to drink that washer fluid. Some things just aren't worth a Klondike Bar), and regarded the blonde woman (_Lots_ of things aren't worth a Klondike Bar) with a superior air. "Ritsu, you haven't been living with him for the last year."

"Well I have," Asuka loudly interjected. Ritsuko inwardly cringed at Asuka's downright creepy, lecherous leer; she shouldn't be allowed to smile like that for another ten years. "You ever wonder what he's doing alone in his room while he's listening to his SDAT?"

Misato shrugged and blinked. "No."

Asuka's grin vanished. "M-me neither," she stuttered, but recovered from her lie like a politician, pivoting towards the exit to Central Dogma to save her reddening face. "But you can't tell me it's healthy for someone to obsess over something like that."

Ritsuko spared the Second Child's retreating back a second-long glance as the girl muttered something. About Kaji. And marmalade. And then it sounded like Kajilade, but Asuka was pretty far away by then.

Apparently Misato had overheard the red head, too. "Can you believe the fate of the world depends on her?"

Naoko Akagi's daughter hummed in concurrence. "Almost as hard to believe that we depend on a borderline lush to give her orders."

"You are _so_ lucky I'm sober now!"

_Of course you are, it isn't two o'clock yet_. "Stay that way. Construction costs for Unit-03 ran eighty billion yen over budget. I don't think the Second Branch will appreciate you wrecking their export because you made it fight a giant rabbit named Fred."

Misato's indignation was shamefully obvious. "For the last time, her name was _Frank_, okay? And she kept trying to get me to taste Maya's brains! Aren't you ever going to let that one go?"

"One day," Ritsuko peered over he kohai's shoulder. "Not today."

"My…my _brains_?"

"Ritsu, I'm not going to break it…whenever the hell it gets here. Can you imagine it, though? I like our chances with a foursome."

Ritsuko Akagi could not help but shiver. The last time Misato had used the word 'foursome', she hadn't been able to see straight for weeks. She needed to forget. Now.

She did, but in exchange was reminded of her intense hatred of hexagons, red, six-sided claxon-accompanied digitized polygons of death. And suddenly they were _everywhere_.

"So many pentagons…" Aoba observed.

* * *

_She will not stop talking._

Rei Ayanami was a patient girl. Or so she thought. Commander Ikari rarely bestowed gifts on the Child under his guardianship, and those he did present to her were never mere material possessions. It was always knowledge or a skill, utilities that unfailingly facilitated the purpose for which she was created.

_Will she not close her mouth? Is this an impossibility?_

One day, when she was very young, when memories and dreams still bled into one another, the gift had been discretion.

_I do not believe she has taken a breath. It defies logic._

Discretion was a founding pillar of life experience for the First Child, and from it she soon learned efficiency, the ability to discern when and when not to talk, to act or not to act, to calibrate her actions for maximum affect with minimum effort.

_Her mouth is a universe unto itself._

Patience was relatively new to Rei, though due to the circumstances of her unique existence (Irony was still lost on her) it came naturally, and was seamlessly incorporated into her vast stores of precisely cultivated discipline. Or so she thought.

_For what reason am I being punished?_

Because since the alert had sounded and she had met up with the Second Child in a hallway adjacent to the women's locker room, the red head had not-

_Shut up._

Rei had wasted a second attempting to decipher Asuka's ceaseless, shrill, and ceaselessly shrill ramblings, and instantly regretted it. As they approached Central Dogma for their status update and eventual sortie orders, the waif-like albino now could not summon the discipline to block out all of the German's monologue. Singular words gnawed at her subconscious like a starving tic: Shinji. Kaji. Wondergirl. Gott. Synch rate. Shinji. Ferret. Wondergirl. Kaji. Wondergirl. Wondergirl._Wondergirl_.

_I am just going to snap._

They passed a cold water pipe, and for some reason –some loud, obnoxious, foreign red-headed reason- Rei wondered just how much strength it would take to wrench a section of it loose. Yes…if she was discreet, and efficient in her motions, she could catch Asuka off guard. All she needed was to be patient.

_Bludgeoning her…would be agreeable. _

They approached the threshold of central command, and Rei was able to at least take solace in the fact that very soon Asuka would have to shut her face. She would soon have her quiet.

Or so she thought.

No sooner had the automatic door to Central Dogma slid open with a mechanical whoosh, did two lower-level technicians tear past her as though engulfed in invisible flames. Had Rei Ayanami been a girl of more liberal conventions, she might have described the piecemeal anarchy infecting everyone in headquarters as several flavors of horseshit being hurled by monkeys into a supercharged turbofan. Rei Ayanami was not a girl of liberal conventions.

Asuka was saying something. "-bofan!"

Lieutenant Ibuki was saying something. "-plosions in districts twenty-three and thirty-one! And twenty-eight! Thirty, twent-ni-"

Lieutenant Hyuga was saying something. "-SDF VTOL's have engaged Unit-"

Ibuki again. "Forty-seven, thirty-two…nineteen, twenty-six…"

"-TOL's are fleeing from Unit-"

"Stuff get blowed-up real good _everywhere_!" Aoba yelled.

"Yes, thank you, I can see that!" Major Katsuragi loudly informed the brown-haired officer. "Now how do we stop him? Come on, Maya! Use that big, juicy brain of yours!"

Dr. Akagi whirled from the five-story monitor feeding headquarters images from the surface city. Why is everything on fire? "Will you please get your hands off my student's scalp? And getting him to stop is _your_ problem, Misato!"

"Stop _who_?" Asuka asked as she numbly stood at Rei's side.

The two most powerful women in Nerv finally noticed the girls as a ten-thousand ton Takanami-Class destroyer casually arced across the screen before silently floating out of view. There was the sound of a spectacular explosion and the video feed shuddered.

"Maya," Dr. Akagi said. Lieutenant Ibuki flicked a switch.

"-FULL OF LUMBERJACKS! SOCKO ERFERGUM SNAFU ON THE BLUE BABOOOOOOON! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I RUSN'T MUN AWAY! YOU THINK YOU CAN PLAY ME, YODA? THE DONKEYS KNOW, THE LIZARD QUEEN _ALWAYS_ KNOWS! I AM THE OLLIN! I WILL ATTAIN YOLTEOTL, BITCH! POPSCOKLE REMAMSLURP SNIPPER! ROAR. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-"

Lieutenant Ibuki flicked a switch.

"Wait. _Wait_…baka Shinji's blowing the shit out of the city because someone trashed his tunes?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, Asuka," Misato said.

_Why not just override his control circuit and raise the LCL pressure? _Rei thought. Asuka said it, more colorfully and with a surprising quantity of spittle.

"That's the first thing we tried," said Misato as she wiped her face off with a sleeve of her red jacket, then turned slightly to glare at the blonde woman. "And it would've worked, too, if _somebody_ hadn't given him the ability to block _our_ override command!"

"And if _you_ had bothered to pay attention at the briefing today," Dr. Akagi lethally countered, "you would've realized that was part of the test, Major, in case one day security in Central Dogma is compromised, in case one day Tokyo-3 comes under attack from hostile terrestrial forces!"

Major Katsuragi chanced a look at the monitor. Tucked in a lower corner of the giant screen was live footage of Tokyo-3 Junior High.

**BOOM.**

Tucked in a lower corner of the giant screen was live footage of the crater that had been Tokyo-3 Junior High. Misato jerked a thumb at the giant smoldering bowl, smiling jauntily. "Is that terrestrial enough for you, Ritsu?"

And that was when the Project E. Chairperson finally lost her composure.

* * *

He watched Ritsuko Akagi roar something at Misato Katsuragi and gesticulate wildly. He watched the Major rear back wide-eyed before shouting back, stepping forward and violently stabbing the other woman in the chest with an index finger. Then she used another finger to express herself. Meanwhile, something else in his city happily detonated.

He had enough of this.

"**Everyone will immediately conduct themselves in a manner befitting professional Nerv officers**…" Even from his lofty position above all but one of his bickering, panicking, hopelessly incompetent subordinates, Gendo Ikari could sense the shift in mood, the return to order swift like the shadow of a falcon. He would always sense it, from a thousand feet above, a mile above…"**or be relieved from duty. Indefinately**."

His most valuable lamb found herself, and her green eyes were sharp as she turned to him. He absorbed Dr. Akagi's silent apology. _So utterly predictable_. Gendo let himself _feel_ for a sliver of a second. Here, he knew everyone. Everyone and everything. Completely.

"Sir," began Major Katsuragi, her professionalism now wholly reconsolidated, "we're…we're still evaluating the situation, but have yet to determine the most effective means of resolving the matter."

Oh, how he wanted to cut her down in the middle of her self-serving lie. But to openly dress down a woman who relied so heavily on the respect of her (present) charges to be effective would be…imprudent. He settled on a calculated smirk, smoothly sliding his dark frames up the bridge of his nose and saying, "Perhaps your 'evaluation' should include the option of removing Unit-01's umbilical cable?"

"You're coy today, Ikari," Fuyutski said as he stood at ease by Gendo's right-hand side.

"But Commander," said Dr. Akagi, "Unit-01 doesn't have an umbilical cable." Gendo was sure her eyebrows lowered as she spoke, filed it under 'insignificant'.

"Then his internal battery will be depleted any second now. The crisis will be at an end and the pilot will be removed-"

"_Commander_," Ritsuko Akagi intoned in a low, almost dangerous voice. The file was upgraded to 'uh-oh'. "I know that you could only attend the briefing though video-conferencing, but…weren't you listening to what I was saying?"

"Don't be coy."

"We were testing_regenerative_ batteries! If he keeps up this level of activity he could be moving eight _hours_ from now!"

Major Katsuragi gasped. Pilot Sohryu gasped. Lieutenants Hyuga and Ibuki gasped. Lieutenant Aoba tuned his air guitar. Gendo's dark frames smoothly slid down the bridge of his nose. And he was not smirking as he glared down, momentarily speechless, at Dr. Akagi. She shook her head as the whole of Central Dogma was treated to the sight of the purple-armored Test Type furiously jump-roping with the cable of a suspension bridge which was, mysteriously, no longer suspended.

"Everyone, I'm just curious," the blonde woman began, "was _anyone_ listening to me earlier when I was detailing the test today? Anyone at all? Because I spent seventy-eight _hours_ on those PowerPoint slides!" She looked up at Gendo, no, to his right. "Commander Fuyutski?"

The old man was standing…

"I had…um…more pressing matters to think of."

…but certainly not at ease.

Ritsuko Akagi's pleading eyes snapped to her protégé. "Maya…"

"Sempai…my younger brother's getting married and I'm figuring out all the catering arrangements. I'm sorry…"

The blonde doctor looked at the two comparatively sane pilots. "Asuka, give me some good ne-"

"Kaji."

"_Rei?_"

"I was thinking of how much I dislike eating meat. And also of red…the color I hate. And for a moment, turquoise, a color I discovered towards which I bear no particular animosity…unless it is turquoise-flavored meat."

Dr. Akagi emitted a sound completely devoid of humor. "Hyuga?"

"Well, I can tell you what I wasn't thinking about…pornography. And Misato."

"_DON'T ANY OF YOU MONKEYS KNOW HOW TO LIE?_" Desperate, Ritsuko gulped in air and turned to her last bastion of hope. "Aoba…_please_."

The man in question crossed his arms over his chest, his mouth a flat line as he returned her intense stare. For the first time, his dark eyes hummed with his old intellige-

"Matt. _Damon_."

"Asuka, Rei, suit up," Katsuragi ordered as she pried Dr. Akagi's fingers from Aoba's windpipe. "You two are going Shinji huntin'."

"BELAY THAT."

"Sir?" The Major shot him an intensely puzzled look.

"Commander?" Ritsuko said.

"Gendo?" Fuyutski managed.

"Narf?" said Aoba.

_Did I stutter?_

"Dr. Akagi, I assume that all civilians were sent to evacuation shelters before the field tests commenced?"

"Yes sir. Of course, sir."

"Units-00 and 02 are_not_ to engage Shinji. You are charged with finding a way to regain access to the control circuit of Unit-01's entry plug. I trust that this task is not above someone of your exceptional talents, doctor?"

A little flattery to grease the wheels; Ritsuko validated him even as her green eyes betrayed disapproval. She knew what he knew. The city was replaceable. The Second Child and Rei were replaceable. Major Katsuragi, too. _She_ was replaceable.

Unit-01 was not. _Yui_ was not, and he would not risk her unnecessari-

_**BOOM.**_

It should have been just another explosion signifying the conflagration of yet another replaceable surface building. It wasn't.

Hyuga gasped. "_SIR!_ WE JUST LOST THE BASKIN ROBBINS ON IMAEDA AVENUE!"

It was as if Central Dogma had been renovated as a mass grave.

Subtly, Fuyutski leaned towards his only superior officer. "Ikari…that's thirty-one flavors…waffle cones…rainbow sprinkles…"

"Did they have," Gendo paused, "Butter Pecan?"

From the corner of Ikari's eye, the old man's deathly-ill profile darkened as he slowly nodded.

_That's it._

The Supreme Commander of Nerv rose from his Laz-E-Bastard. "Unit-00 and Unit-02 will proceed to cage four. Once at the surface they will intercept the Third Child and initiate a **Level-Three Old School Beatdown**."

Next Chapter: Rei and Asuka Get Their Shit Ruined

A/N: Hello again. Um…as you could probably tell from the summary of this story, it's not really going to be a oneshot. I don't know what happened. I just started writing…and writing…and _writing_…and realized that I had written a lot. I couldn't really expect anyone to read all that in one sitting. Well…I could…but not in good conscience.

Random A/N: I'd like to thank my pre-reader, MidnightCereal, for depriving me of sleep and making me write the entire effin' story freehand before I put a single word to a computer screen. Thanks for the arthritis, asshole.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	2. Rei and Asuka

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything: Rei and Asuka Get Their Shit Ruined

By MidnightCereal

"Okay, Wondergirl. I don't like you and you don't like me. But just because I sprayed the lining of your panties with liquid catnip doesn't mean we can't work together on this. Right? We're pros, so let's act the part."

"That…you were responsible for that?"

"I got a plan. I can take him but you're going to have to distract him while I get in position."

"They kept coming and coming. Mewling and scratching. Pawing down there…I was so confused at the end."

"Now, we both know you're no conversationalist. You don't have to be. You've been doing this longer than even me, so just think of something to keep him occupied. Snipe his crazy ass, for all I care."

"For two weeks mine was a lightless world of witch hazel and vulgar double entendre."

"If we do this right we won't even have to kill him."

"I will kill y-"

With the flicker of a thought the First Child's face winked out of existence right above Asuka's controls. _That freak is practically gabby today_.

No matter. She blocked Rei out, blocked everything out. Nothing except this moment mattered, because this moment was _showtime_. She did not care about the particular sequence of events that resulted in that dumbass razing Tokyo-3 to the ground. She didn't care how crazy he was; he had to have known it would eventually come to this.

And all because of his music box, his little el-cheapo second-rate name brand knockoff of a SDAT. Oh, sure, he'll cry and scream and care for _that_, but not for-

She blocked it out.

"_I'll_ give him something to cry about."

As if switch-activated, her confidence soared when she closed the circuit and was crushed into her seat at two-hundred and sixteen kilometers per hour.

* * *

By the time Rei's tertiary locks had disengaged and her Eva lurched forward from its launch pad, she already knew –without Major Katsuragi informing her- where Evangelion Unit-01 was.

Because it was staring at her right now.

The First Child took a moment to flick a glance beyond the Test Type's left shoulder. She breathed, blinked, and looked to Unit-01's right. She became acutely aware of the fact that the left and right views were interchangeable.

Had Rei Ayanami been a girl of liberal conventions, she might have described the ubiquitous and wholly anarchic destruction Shinji had wantonly perpetrated on the Tokyo-3 Metropolitan Area as the result of God and Mother Nature playing naked landmine twister. Rei Ayanami was not a girl of liberal conventions.

She realized she was saying something. "-ister."

Rei _had_ spent an unpleasantly large amount of time in the presence of the Second Child.

_RAGE_.

Where did that come from?

Eva Unit-01 was still staring at her.

_I must distract him. The Second Child will be moving to ambush position. The impossibly difficult Second Child will be moving…_

She gave the mental command and a notepad-sized window materialized at eye level with a chirp, loud and bubbly and artificially coy.

Like the Second Child.

"Pilot Ikari, you are hereby ordered to immediately stand down and return to headquarters via Access Route Twenty. Once there, you will evacuate the entry plug and prepare for detention. Do you understand?"

"Who the hell are you supposed to be, my mother?" **Unit-01 Sound Only** answered.

"Uh…"

_What is this feeling?_

_It is constricting, yet it breaches the stark light of my borrowed soul with hardly a feather's caress._

_It is tangible._

_Yet is beyond my grasping fingers._

_It surrounds me, a hostile invader. _

_Yes, it is an enemy._

_Yet it is an enemy also from within, as familiar to me as my name._

_It clamors; a neglected and forlorn child hungering for its mother's nurturing eyes. _

_Yet it repulses me._

_I turn from it and shun it to diminish its power ov-_

_AWKWARDNESS. GOD._

_What?_

_IT IS AWKWARDNESS. YOU ARE EMBARRASSED_ _BECAUSE YOU ESSENTIALLY ARE HIS MOTHER._

_Who is this? Are you me?_

_ONE STUPID QUESTION AT A TIME, PLEASE._

_Am I you?_

_REPHRASING A STUPID QUESTION DOES NOTHING TO DIMINISH ITS UNFAILING STUPIDITY. SO TO ANSWER YOUR REPHRASED YET SOLIDY STUPID QUESTION, I AM THE REI AYANAMI THAT EXISTS INSIDE REI AYANAMI, AND WHO WANTS REI AYANAMI TO PLEASE JUST GET TO THE FUCKING POINT, BECAUSE I HAVE OTHER THINGS TO DO TODAY, LIKE WASHING A LOAD OF WHITES, BECAUSE BUTTER PECAN STAINS DO NOT BLEACH THEMSELVES, THANK YOU._

_Why are you shouting?_

_IT HAPPENS THAT I AM ALSO THE REI AYANAMI THAT JUST DOES WHATEVER SHE DAMN-WELL PLEASES, AND RIGHT NOW REI AYANAMI FEELS LIKE SHOUTING. YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF REI AYANAMI. TRICK._

_Impulsive…were you the one that ate my eggplant somen?_

_LET US IGNORE THE GLARINGLY OBVIOUS FACT THAT I AM A MERELY A CONSTRUCT OF YOUR OVERACTIVE PSYCHE AND HAVE NO WAY OF INTERACTING WITH THE PHYSICAL WORLD IN ANY CONCEIVABLE MANNER; NO. THAT WAS THE SECOND CHILD._

_But I had labeled it appropriately. I also do not understand how you would have knowledge of this incident, yet I do n-_

_BLAME THAT BITCH. ALSO BLAME HER FOR YOUR ACID REFLUX, AND PERHAPS COMMANDER IKARI'S HEMORRHOIDS. _

_He has been difficult this month._

_THAT FOOL. HE SHOULD HAVE USED PREPARATION-H. NOW LOOK AT HIM, FIDGETING AND EVERYTHING. YOU JUST KNOW HE WANTS TO SCRATCH. AND DOES IT NOT FEEL NOT RIGHT NOT TO BLAME THE SECOND CHILD FOR INFLAMED ANUSES? YES OR NO?_

_If I desire…vengeance on Pilot Sohryu, would you assist me?_

_I AM THE REI AYANAMI THAT THOUGHT YOU WOULD NEVER ASK._

"Rei, you still didn't answer my question. Who're you supposed to be to me?" That was from Unit-01, crushing a Honda underfoot when it lightly stepped forward. A C-130 Hercules dangled loosely by an aileron from a giant purple hand. "It's okay. I never really knew my _real_ mother…hey, maybe we can pretend!"

"I believe that would be inappropriate in lieu of the current situation."

"C'mon, it'll be fun!" he pleaded as Unit-01 tossed the cargo plane over its shoulder and was momentarily silhouetted by a billowing collage of dirty oranges and yellows. "You need to loosen up, like I have. I'm so loose I think I'll fall apart. I need something else to hold me together, and I think you'll do fine. Be my mom, Rei."

"I…I would not know how to-"

He produced a pallete rifle. "Please?"

"Okay."

"Guess what I did today, mom!"

"Okay." It disturbed her, how…natural this seemed to her. Hearing his smiling voice, however tinged with mania, was awakening something in her that she was not surprised existed, but nevertheless did not expect to surface.

She felt like smiling. She felt like talking him out of this and getting out of the plug with arms wide open and wrapping his kneeling form in a warm embrace, consuming all his fears and telling him how good he was and how everything was going to be okay. She wanted him to hear her voice, to hear her heartbeat, to slumber in her lap, utterly confident that when he awoke the Earth, the Moon and Sun would still be there.

"What did you do today…Shin-chan?"

"DON'T PRETEND LIKE YOU CARE, YOU BLACK-WINGED QUEEN OF THE ASS HARPIES!"

"…mrr?"

"YOU'RE JUST PUTTING ON AIRS FOR MS. SASAHARA BECAUSE HER DAUGHTER GOT INTO TOKYO UNIVERSITY!"

"What is an 'Ass Harpy'?"

"WELL, I CAN'T BE SMART LIKE KIKYO, BUT I CAN _DANCE_, MOM, DANCE LIKE A SWAN! IF YOU REALLY CARED YOU'D WATCH ME DANCE!"

"I-I _do_ care." She really did, even though she did not know who in the name of Lilith Ms. Sasahara was, or how one would dance like a swan, or why Unit-01 had just taken a bite of a nearby skyscraper. "If I did not, I would not tell you to look behind you."

"Why would I-" He turned…

* * *

…but it was too late for him. She was too fast, too skilled, too experienced, too ruthless. He would see her for a moment and the next he would be staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.

He helplessly tracked her as she descended, a bird of prey, a black angel between the sun and sky whose form grew over the hanging rays of light. She spread her red wings and her progressive knife, the promise of order restored, hummed at the end of one. The energy blade came forward as she zeroed in on her target, which began to freeze as time became a cold molasses between them.

She saw beyond the tapering waves of superheated air convecting from her electric foil the eyes of the enemy –because that was what he was, now- somehow reflected in the unwavering yellow glowing slits.

Even in the crawl of milliseconds there was no hesitation, no dissenting whisper in the heart or mind to offer a scent of sweet mercy, no silent plea for forgiveness. A hunter rids herself of these fragile abstractions to become the harbinger of closure before, and the fulfillment of it after.

Her conviction remained toxically pure as the light of her soul easily neutralized his own with a slight shudder…

…_way_ too easily…

* * *

Rei felt no desire whatsoever to improve on her status as spectator. It was undesirable to be in Unit-01's position as the red machine fell upon it. It was even less desirable to be Unit-02, whose pilot seemingly did not care, did not notice, or had no time to react to the actions of its stalwart prey…

...whose arms shot out to the sides and _extended_ like harpoon cables until the hands at the end of each dug into the facades of stupidly tall buildings. They instantly retracted, taking the superstructures with them in a conflagration of sound as they were ripped from their foundations and hurled backwards and up in a wide, perfectly timed arc…

Rei could not bear to look.

Yes she could.

It was like witnessing a man jump between two speeding trains on a collision course, and as in the case of David Blaine's final (and very unsuccessful) stunt, this could only end one way.

**_SPLAT_**, which was quickly and vigorously followed by what had to be every noise known to man.

_I wonder what that must feel like._

* * *

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

_Ow._

* * *

There was shock. Then there was the utterly ubiquitous emotional constipation that blew through Central Dogma like a desert wind, dropping jaws and bulging eyes faster than a wickedly clever analogy.

It was only when Unit-01 undid the makeshift sandwich over its head and Unit-02 had been shat out of the sky did someone in headquarters finally speak.

"MATT DAMON!" Aoba exclaimed, rising from his terminal and smacking his console with the flats of his hands…and accidentally depressing a large striped button.

* * *

If the Third Child catching Unit-02 between two one-hundred and thirty-thousand ton supertowers had not validated Rei's satisfaction with being merely a conscientious observer, what happened next did.

Astonishingly, the red golem rose, steady as a punch-drunk ballroom boxer at the count of nine-point seven. It stood and swayed at its full height, just in time to have a hidden sheet of reinforced titanium shoot upwards from the street and slam unheeded into its groin at the speed of sound. Rei tracked the Second Child once more descend to Earth; fortunately, Unit-02 broke its own fall with its face.

_I wonder what that must feel like._

As the first Evangelion production model began crawling to her like a paraplegic cat, something new, a burgeoning feeling, overcame the First Child.

_What is this that floods my heart? The pain Pilot Sohryu currently suffers fills me with…happiness?_

_DUH._

_Ah. I am beginning to understand…this bitch called payback. Is this not the appropriate time to rub it in?_

_MY WORK HERE IS DONE._

Unit-00's monocular head tilted downward as the Second inched closer. Had the blue Evangelion a mouth, it would have been grinning from ear to ear…had it also ears.

"Pilot Sohryu, you should consider yourself fortunate that you do not possess external reproductive organs. Otherwise, the last blow would have been exceedingly painful."

As if operated by an octogenarian with Parkinson's disease, the red crawling mecha raised a quaking hand and, with the last of its failing strength, slapped Unit-00 on the wrist.

"Why did you just tag meeeeeeaaarrrRRRGGGGHHH-" was as far as Rei got before she was spear-tackled by Unit-01, which immediately proceeded to do things to Unit-00 that could only be described as exceedingly painful.

* * *

Ritsuko Akagi stood and watched.

She watched not because she enjoyed seeing Shinji hold the Prototype by its ankles and crisply snap it as though it were a thick flag whipping in a stark wind. She took no pleasure in witnessing the purple hell beast invert Unit-02 to pile-drive it into a fleet of perfectly full eighteen-wheel petroleum tankers. She felt nothing positive as Unit-01 became the tallest, most deranged carousel on Earth, its counterparts flailing wildly from each of its serpentine arms. Asuka caught a small stadium with her face. No joy. There was nothing remotely amusing about the way Unit-01 DDT'd then expertly riverdanced on the neck of Unit-00.

She watched, because_not_ watching meant having no excuse to avoid Misato Katsuragi's glare. "Dr. Akagi…W…T…_F_."

The Major's voice belonged to a twitching drunken lunatic. What disturbed Ritsuko most was the underlying sweetness in Misato's tone; she hid her anger the same way a Great White Shark hid row upon row of teeth.

_If I move suddenly, I will be shot_.

The best friend Ritsuko ever had took a deep, deeeeeeep breath. "Alright…I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I would've realized he had extendable arms had I listened in the briefing today. So, to be perfectly picture postcard clear, is there any other weapon that you pimped Shinji's ride out with –surface-to-air nipples, ultrasonic atomic farts, honey-coated fingers- that you should tell me about? BECAUSE IF THAT THING STARTS PEEING FIRE I'M GOING TO BE _REALLY_ PISSED!"

"It's probably not going to start peeing fire," Ritsuko assured, making a mental note to move the SAN room to a level requiring a higher clearance. _Much higher_, she thought when she finally looked at her buddy, absently rubbing the small angular bulge beneath her jacket…and also the gun on her hip.

The Project E. Chairwoman turned away and back to the monitor, where she not at all enjoyed seeing Unit-01 drive Unit-02's back across its purple knee as if it were a rotting broom handle.

* * *

Every once in a long while Kensuke Aida came down from his self-induced state of high-level military otakudom to take a good look at his surroundings. Some days he came down in front of a crinkled tube of rubber cement and his unfinished 1:72 scale model of a Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche, and let loose a deep and jagged sigh. This had considerably less to do with the epoxy fumes, and considerably more to do with the fact that he knew what a Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche was.

One day the sandy-haired be(freckled/speckled) teenager came down in the middle of the girl's locker room after the volleyball team's afternoon practice…allegedly (They'd need evidence to prove their ridiculous accusations, and that hole in the wall of his room behind his dresser had been sealed with a thin steel plate and a liberal application of rubber cement).

He came down again today, away from his home, his sanctuary of plastic model kits, replicas of automatic firearms, his dating simassively multiplayer first-person shooters, and saw the inside of a sterile civilian evacuation shelter. It was an utterly expansive nouveau-utilitarian space, its white walls filled with people and laughter and crying babies.

An evacuation drill manager stepped past Kensuke, who sat on the floor and threw languid glances at his father, Touji Suzahara's grandfather, and Hikari Horaki's dad, chatting amiably a good distance away.

Kensuke's father laughed, the most fun Kensuke had had all day.

"We're missing something. Something big."

The larger boy sitting on the floor to his immediate left immediately became wary.

"Don't give me that look, Touji. We've been here for five hours. You can't tell me you don't want to know what's happening up there!"

"My guess," said Touji, "is that something really big is beating the crap outta something else really big, and when it's all over, one or both of them'll blow up. Now, you tell me why we need to be standing fifty feet away from them to prove me right."

"Because I'd rather be shot by an eighty caliber bullet than sit here another minute and be bored to death!"

Touji looked at his good friend as though he had Kool-Aid pouring from his ears, and then shook his head. "Wow…I don't really think that's normal, Ken. Maybe you should think about seeing a traumaticist or something."

And right then, never had the urge been stronger for Kensuke to punch Touji in the face. On one hand, he was happy that his friend was making a conscious effort to improve his vocabulary, but only insofar that Suzahara tried using words that actually _existed_.

To Kensuke's knowledge, there was no such thing as a scrotary phone.

"_C'mon_, Touji…who knows how long we'll be stuck in here. And we've done crazier things than this, haven't we? Like that time we went to Misato's-"

"NO, don't remind me!" the jock nearly yelled, shielding himself as if the memory would bite him clean in half. "I couldn't see straight for _weeks_ after it was all over. Besides…" He flicked a nervous glance to something a few meters away. Someone. A girl.

Kensuke could only blink at first. "Uh…where'd Hikari get that crossbow?"

"I think a better question is why she won't stop stroking it. Maybe she's still mad about that time we snuck out and nearly got smushed. You know she got in trouble for letting us out of her sight?"

The girl's face had turned to them so slowly that Kensuke didn't realize at first that she was now staring at them, and had been in earshot the whole time…

"Nope," Kensuke sighed, "we're not going anywhere."

Touji punched his friend in the shoulder. "It's for the best, dude. Whatever's happening out there's not good. It never is. There's evilry afoot, I'm sure of it."

Jesus _Chr_…where's rubber cement when you need it?

* * *

"_AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"_said Asuka.

Earth and sky exchanged positions at will as she tumbled parabolically through the air. As Asuka's stomach enthusiastically performed Olympic-level rhythmic gymnastics she felt equal parts relief and bone-deep apprehension her involuntary aerial cartwheels afforded her periodic glimpses of the approa-

**BAM**.

Mountains hurt.

Asuka just sat there in the plug, twitching, when a voice came over the com link.

"Sarsuka! Bar su kanrkit snapokuvit! Sarsuka? SARSUKA!" It sounded like Misartope, but the naked green elves kept sticking q-tips in her ears.

"Sarsuka? Asuka? Snap out of it!"

"I'm fine," the German pilot relayed when the Japanese language ceased to be linguistic slush. She looked at her concerned guardian through the liquid portal. "I'm okay, now…the elves are gone."

"O…..kaaaaaaay. Look. It's time to try something different. Rei's fine, but Unit-00 is down a kilometer west of you. And about eight-hundred meters east…and maybe two k southwest, and-"

"They were magic elves."

"ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?"

"Yeah. Wondergirl punked out. I can finally tear into him now that she's out of my way."

If there was a way to strangle the sardonic look off the woman's face through the video link, the Second Child would have discovered it. "_Right_…maybe if you keep this up he'll drain his battery punching you in the face."

DAMMIT. It killed the proud teenager to admit it, but she was outclassed. It would kill her even faster if she charged Shinji's machine again; getting within his guard had proved so far impossible.

There was just something sobering about being uppercut by someone a football field away from you.

And that battery of his! He had fought them both, never having to worry about tangling himself in or severing his only source of power. Even now she sat in intermediate mode, her internal clock frozen at a little over four minutes. Asuka Langley Sohryu needed a plan. She needed to think. She needed to talk to him…

"WHAT?"

"You heard me, Asuka. Talk to him. We tried fighting him and all that's done is wreck Unit-00 and left you sitting on a hill mumbling about magic faeries."

"They were _elves_, Misato-"

"I DON'T CARE IF THEY WERE…" By some act of God, Katsuragi regained her composure and lowered her tight fist. "Why is this going to be a problem?"

"Why _wouldn't_ it be a problem?"

"Let's get real. Okay? Neither one of us is stupid enough to not realize that you can get to him."

_Die, Misato. Die. Drop dead. I don't want to hear this_. "You're imagining that."

A very live Misato shook her head knowingly and grinned dangerously. "It's up to you. We both know it. You can touch him in a way no one else can. Not me, not Rei, not this…this Mana girl that just popped up out of nowhere. _You_. Talk to him. Can you try?"

Asuka didn't like where this was going, or how loudly it was going, or who it was going so loudly to, and she said as much.

"_Oh_, cut the crap, little girl! Everyone down here is too busy running around like a chicken with its head cut off to give a damn _how_ we stop him. You honestly think there's one person here that doesn't know what it's like to be loved?"

* * *

Makoto Hyuga sighed.

* * *

The prospect of walking right up to Evangelion Unit-01 and allowing it to break her in half suddenly appealed to Asuka very much. _Anything_ else. Anything else but…

"Come on…" she heard Misato softly plead. "We're not asking for some full-blown confession, just for you to try to appeal to him, to buy Dr. Akagi some time. Please."

"NO."

The hairs on teenager's neck stood as Misato erupted in peals of haughty laughter. "Oh, this is too good…who would've thought the _Great_ Asuka Langley Sohryu was nothing but a skinny poser-"

"WHO'RE YOU CALLING A POSER YOU WINO SLUT?"

Misato chortled. Asuka tried killing her with a glare. "What's the matter? Couldn't kick Shinji's ass, now you can't even _outsmart_ him? Christ, Asuka, you might as well use your diploma to wipe your scrawny butt, because that looks like the only way it's getting any use."

Realization pushed its way through the Second Child's occupied brain, and now it was her turn to laugh. "Maybe I _am_ slipping. But I know what you're trying to do, and I haven't got hit in the head nearly enough today for your half-assed reverse psychology to work on me."

Misato shrugged. "It was worth a shot."

"Don't insult me. My ego is not that damned big, okay? Why do I need to negotiate with Shinji just to prove to you that I can?"

Misato just stared.

Asuka just sagged. "I HATE it when I answer my own questions…"

Next Chapter: Both of You, Slam Dance Like You Want to Win!

A/N: Don't have a whole lot to say…maybe I'll plug my new LiveJournal, in which I have not posted a damned thing. It's MidnightCereal, with the M and C lowercase.

Don't be surprised if some parts of the next chapter are just the _teensiest_ bit serious. Not to worry though, it's justified, and it will be counterbalanced by even more wholesome stupidity.

And a Laz-E-Bastard, almost by definition, _must_ be more comfortable than a Laz-E-Boy.

A Laz-E-Bastard must inspire jealously, it must afford the person sitting in it numerous opportunities to be a ginourmous dick. Its wheels are constructed from space-age carbon composites for maximum toe-crushing ability. It offers approximately seventy-nine different types of massages (a great supplement to Preparation-H), all of which are designed to disrupt the concentration of everyone in the immediate vicinity, and in some cases, cause involuntary diarrhea. And perhaps Dana Carvey-level Royal Horniness ©. It is also doubles as a wheelchair powered by eggplant somen.

Its seat is dyed black and quadruple-stitched from the pelt of only the fattest baby harp seals, bartered in exchange for a motorcycle sculpted from dry ice, and from only the drunkest of Yup'ik Tribesmen.

**The Laz-E-Bastard makes you better than EVERYONE ELSE. This is a scientifically proven fact (1).**

(1) This is a lie.

Random A/N: Foolish daywalker, did you really believe even for the slightest sliver of a moment that you could stay up longer than a Night Owl? Very funny. Your pillow is calling you and you have made your bed with the Sandman, now go to sleep. The next 8 hours will be brought to you by the letter z.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

Yeah. Aoba meant to say pentagon.


	3. Both of You

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything: Both of You, Slam Dance Like You Want to Win!

By MidnightCereal

"_I like toast."_

-Shigeru Aoba

* * *

Misato Katsuragi's directions to Unit-01's current position had been unusually precise, even for a woman who had always put her _far_ better foot forward when on duty as Nerv's Operation Planning Manager. They had to be good directions, because her telling Asuka to just follow the trail of destruction would have been like choosing her favorite picture of Touji Suzahara; they were all staggeringly ugly exposures of someone staggeringly ugly. And stupid. And obnoxious. And boorish. And smelly. And stupid. And-

"Please stop talking about that Touji boy and find the guy that is blowing up our city," Misato impatiently requested.

_Damn, did I say that out loud?_ "I'm not so injured that I can't walk and talk at the same time," Asuka said. She passed a smoldering tower. "You're sure there's an umbilical station close to him?"

Misato sighed. "For the fifth time in the last…" She checked her wristwatch. "…forty seconds, _yes_. There are _two_ power stations in proximity to his current position."

"Don't snap at me," snapped Asuka. "I'm just being prepared, that's all. In case I have to move real fast _real fast_."

She passed a smoldering tower.

"You're just going to have to believe me when I say you're not giving yourself enough credit," her guardian assured her. The look on Misato's face, Asuka noted, was not reassuring in the slightest. "I've seen how he looks at you when he thinks you're not paying attention."

"Uh-huh. And you know when I'm paying attention and who I'm paying attention to _how_, exactly?"

"Asuka, you know that thing I keep saying about evasive action and how it draws attention? Right now, you have the radar signature of a small planet. Playing dumb doesn't suit you."

"Exactly, so you see how walking up to someone who's spent the last two hours screaming some things and burning everything else and asking him to stop in the name of love is only slightly smarter than me getting out and humping his foot."

"I want to hear it," Misato ordered after she stopped gnawing on her fist. "I want to hear this plan you have, that's going to beat Shinji and fix you and Rei up and restore the city. I want to hear how you're going to make things right, right _now_. Go ahead, Asuka. Go _right_ ahead. I'm listening. I'm open to suggestions. I'm a goddamn sponge. Let's hear it."

The teenager's first response was to just lean back and lightly bang her head against its seat rest. "I know. I _know_. I have to do this. I'm…I just don't know if I'm ready for this."

"No one is," Katsuragi said, simply, with no heat, yet paradoxically exuding warmth. "Asuka…if you know something else we can do, tell me. Otherwise…what choice is there?"

Asuka sighed deeply.

She passed a smoldering tower.

And on the other side of it was Unit-01. It was kneeling in a half-demolished intersection as though it, or the person in it, was contemplating something vastly more profound than the concrete fingers reaching for the sky at an array of obtuse angles, like yo mama's teeth.

_Showtime…_

To her surprise, Shinji's voice (but not his face) came over the com first as his war machine looked up. "Hey, Asuka."

She refused to let his absurdly docile tone jar her fledgling conviction. "Hi, Shinji."

"How're you feeling?" She could almost see him discreetly looking her up and down, up and down, the same way he had desperately tried not to that day she came in shivering, wearing nothing but shorts and a thin white t-shirt, completely drenched from running through an impromptu torrential downpour…

"I've been better. I've been worse, too. How are _you_ doing?" She asked the question with sincere but overwrought candor, as she would tell a three-year old their drawing was pretty_. Just how smart are you, Shinji? You should know something is up now, that_-

"You're not here to fight me, are you?"

"Well, I don't know. You almost out of juice? You still got Gumby arms?"

Unit-01 was standing now. "You can find out for yourself, if you want."

She shook her head even though the Third Child couldn't see it. "I've taken enough chances today. So let's hammer this out diplomatically, for once."

"You're going to try to talk me out of this?" he asked as Asuka chaffed at the naked amusement in his tight-rope steady voice.

"I _am_ talking you out of it. You want me to, or you would've already thrown me into a mountain…again."

She waited for his next answer, her heart racing faster as seconds went by and he said nothing. Asuka drowned the smirk on her face; winning half the battle does nothing to secure half the victory…

"You're going through shit. That…is _obvious_. I'm giving you some credit, though. I'm assuming that this was just the last in a long line of straws, Shinji. I don't know how many I have left, myself. I know that when people do things like this, there doesn't have to be a real reason for it. It's just…I think it's the body acting out what the mind can't handle. And when the mind isn't overburdened anymore…the body _stops_."

"So…so you're saying I don't want to do this anymore?"

_He's following me. He's paying attention_. "How much more is it going to take? Before you're satisfied? You've been talking, _lucidly_ talking with me for a minute now. You can't pretend like you don't know what you're doing. How much more will it take for you to STOP HUMPING THAT BUILDING!"

"_Asuka_…you're doing _real_ good. Let him hump whatever he wa-"

The command whip-cracked from the German's mind and the terminal with Misato's increasingly apprehensive visage vanished. Righteous, flammable feminine anger began mingling with her warrior spirit and rapidly fading cautious optimism.

"This is _pathetic_, Shinji, you know that? PATHETIC. I can see you getting back at everyone because they forced you to pilot, or if you had to hurt or kill someone you cared about, BUT IT'S NOT ONE OF THOSE THINGS. You're flipping out, you leveled this _whole_ damn place, and why? Because someone wrecked your _shitty_ SDAT!"

Unit-01 wheeled to face her and her stomach dropped as his A.T. Field exploded. "THEY WERE MY _**MOM'S** _SONGS! SHE LEFT IT WITH MY UNCLE THE LAST DAY HE SAW HER ALIVE AND HE GAVE IT TO ME! THOSE WERE **_HER_** SONGS!"

The Second Child's heart joined her stomach not because of what he said, but because of what she knew she had to say next_. Forgive me_, she thought, and braced herself. "Then losing that SDAT was the _best_ thing that could have happened to you."

Shinji expanded the realm of the possible by somehow becoming angrier. "**FUCK YOU, YOU HYPOCRITE! I HEARD YOU CRYING FOR YOUR MOTHER IN YOUR SLEEP! I WAS THERE. YOU'D _KILL_ TO HAVE SOMETHING TO REMEMBER HER BY!**"

Asuka expanded the realm of the possible by somehow becoming angrier than Shinji. "**_AND WHEN IT'S GONE AND THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO TO BRING IT BACK, I WON'T THROW A FUCKING TANTRUM AND ENDANGER ALL THE PEOPLE THAT CARE ABOUT ME!_**"

"WHO? WHO'RE YOU TALKING ABOUT? THE ONLY THING ANYONE HERE CARES ABOUT IS EVA! EVA EVA _EVA_! YOU KNOW I'M RIGHT AND THAT THE ONLY PERSON THAT EVER REALLY CARED IS IN A THOUSAND PIECES AND…AND I JUST WANT HER _BACK_!"

"YOUR MOM ISN'T HERE! **_I_ AM!**"

He made a sound suddenly, as if he was choking, and the roaring light of his soul dwindled to a withered rustle. Unit-01 slowly sank to its knees. Something sorrowful tried separating her from her breath, but she bit it back fiercely. She almost had him, almost. And all it was costing her was her heart.

"If…" she began, quietly now, "if you want to…we can be…we won't _need_ our mothers anymore. You understand what I'm saying?" _Please tell me you understand_.

"I just don't want to forget her."

"You don't have to…" Oh so gingerly, Unit-02 stepped forward. There was the slightest of tingles as his barrier met her own, then dissolved. "But there're things you want her to be to you, and she _can't_, not anymore. It's impossible. There're _so_ many things…and I'm having the hardest time getting by without them, too. It'll get easier, maybe. One day, if I had help. But you're going to have to be a whole lot stronger than _this_."

There it was. An ultimatum delivered by the whispering heart. Either he'd take it or he wouldn't.

A minute passed between them.

A minute passed between them.

A min-

"I'm so tired, Asuka."

Joy, pure unbridled joy seized every fiber of her being as her voice, miraculously, stayed level. "They're waiting for you at Route Twenty. I don't know _what_ they're going to do to you, but after it's over…_I'll_ be waiting for you. Okay?"

"Okay."

Unit-01 rose, and she felt utter triumph, as if the young man beneath its machine exterior had been reborn, and _she_ had done it. _She_ had stopped him without lifting a finger. _She_ had saved the city…well…what was left of it, anyway. _She_ had reasoned with him, and on top of it all, he was now _hers_. It was all she could do to keep Unit-02 from skipping down the blitzkrieged boulevard, Shinji quietly, obediently following her.

An extremely, insignificantly small thing still buzzed her like a hungering gnat, though.

He had said the SDAT had been programmed with his mother's songs. It wasn't as if the songs themselves had been destroyed, had they? Even if they were all pre-Second Impact songs, there were literally thousands of places –either burrowed in the maze of modern mega malls, small specialty shops, online retailers, downloadable master copies from satellite radio- he could go to get them back. SDATs were a dime a dozen; price was the non-issue of non-issues.

There was some sentimental value in that little digital walkman, sure, but he _said_ songs. All this over that little piece of plastic?

_Unbelievable. All this just because I broke your SDAT._

Unit-01 had stopped walking. Why?

Something washed over her and she staggered as if caught in a rising tide of liquid fire. It then occurred to Asuka that in all likelihood, she would not like what she would see when she turned around.

She didn't.

_Damn. Did I say that out loud?_

"**_Yes_**," a malevolent incarnation seethed in Shinji's voice, "**You _DID_**."

The Second Child felt as though she was suddenly trapped at the fringes of the unstoppable maelstrom that was Hurricane Beatdown. But she tried stopping it, anyway.

"Shinji…_darling_…come on, now. Think a sec. What did I just finish explaining? There're two ways you can deal with this. You can either use your freakishly long arms to beat me until I can only say 'chew', or you can ask me why I did it in the first place-"

"THERE'S A THIRD WAY," he roared. "**_LASER EYES!_**"

"Ah…wha?"

* * *

_I knew I forgot something_, thought Ritsuko as she helplessly watched Unit-01's yellow slits glow with unholy power before dual beams of energy raced from them in a deadly burst of light and sound. Unit-02, in an action that probably called upon a lifetime of synchronization training, anticipated the line of fire and dodged, allowing the killing light to crackle past its right shoulder fin. It continued unabated in the distance before vaporizing a mountain that happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

She should've remembered this. It upset her that in the heat of the situation it had slipped from her taxed mind. Unsurprisingly, it had upset Misato, too; the woman had not stopped squeezing the trigger of her service pistol in Ritsuko's direction since ripping the weapon from its holster. Akagi silently wondered if Misato even realized the gun wasn't loaded.

"Does this mean we're not going to see that Maggie Cheung movie on Saturday?"

Misato didn't even take the time to scream as she wildly hurled the empty weapon at her best friend.

"_OW!_ MY _EAR_!"

"Sorry, Maya," said Misato.

"It was an important meeting, Major…you should've been listening…"

"Dr. Akagi…"

"I…I was inspired, Major, alright? We have to continually upgrade…to be prepared for anything-"

"But why would you need lasers in the _eyes_? The EYES, Ritsuko Akagi! Why. Lasers?"

"Because lasers are sweet, Misato!" Ritsuko finally yelled.

"Correction," said a cool voice from on high, the voice of authority. "They are _totally_ sweet."

Major Katsuragi looked for a moment as if she was wishing for a lathe of some kind, and then half-groaned, half sighed. "_Fine_. Whatever. We're all in agreement on the…" Her eyelid danced like a swan. "…the sweetness of lasers-"

"_Total_ sweetness," Gendo interjected.

_Misato's going to do it. She is. I swear to God, she's going to breathe fire_.

Ritsuko felt oddly disappointed when a torrent of orange torches did not leap from Misato Katsuragi's gullet as though she were a human flamethrower. When the purple-haired woman finally swallowed the last of her beret, she said, "None of this _helps_, okay? None of this arguing keeps Asuka from getting melted like the Wicked Witch. None of this helps Unit-02."

"Incoming transmission from Unit-02," informed Maya as she cupped her right ear.

Ritsuko was succinct. "Put her on."

Maya did so.

"-IELD, YOU _MORONS_! WHAT'RE YOU ALL WAITING FOR? SEND ME THE SHUTTLE SHIELD! I HAVE TO GET CLOSE TO HIM!"

* * *

_I HAVE to get away from him._

That was all Asuka's mind accommodated as her avatar dove for cover behind a forest of steel and glass.

That…that _thing_ was out there, stalking her, melting everything it looked at, and by her last count it had tried looking at her seventeen times. As she crouched and strained her senses, she took a precious second to curse Ritsuko Akagi and H.G. Wells to Hell.

_Just how long does it take to prep that damn shield?_

Shinji Ikari tsked. "You just _have_ to stop thinking out loud, Asuka."

SHEISSE!

It was as if an oven was being held over her head. She lunged to the side, Unit-02's right eyes catching the top half of Manko 404 linger upright before collapsing on itself like an accordion and tumbling into her most recent hiding place. Something cut through the ensuing dust cloud, igniting the grey motes of ash into an incandescent incendiary aerosol, and then just as easily cut through a lamp post and three telephone poles, igniting them, too.

Unit-02 crushed itself to the street; the ray beams traced an arc above her head as if originating from a lighthouse built by Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor. "WHERE IS THAT (The adjectives conceived and spoken by Asuka Langley Sohryu to convey her acute irritation have been deemed inappropriate for persons below the age of sixty-four, and have been replaced with a short monologue describing the author's affection for puppies. Aren't puppies sweet? They're so soft and fuzzy, like hairy quadrupedal Smurfs, except without all the mushrooms and white hot pants. Nothing is more endearing than the boundless energy of a rolly-poly wet-nosed dog-baby, so eagerly curious about the wonders of the world its wide eyes are now privy to. It's not that there's anything wrong with kittens, mind you. In fact, I love kittens. They're delicious. ) SHIELD?"

"We're working on it, Asuka!" Misato informed her. Next to the red giant's face a mailbox, a delivery truck, and a fire station began to spontaneously combust.

"I. AM GOING. TO _DIE_. BECAUSE EVERYTHING. IS THE FUCK. ON FIRE."

"Move, Asuka! It's ready, Logistical Route Four!"

"Where the hell is _that_?" Asuka answered, javelin-throwing a flagpole at Unit-01 to stave off disintegration.

"Northwest of you," said Misato. "Six kilometers."

"That's a _huge_ area to cover! Why do you hate me?"

"It's one of the only equipment depots still standing. No choice but to _DUCK_!"

Death rays lanced overhead as Unit-02 reared back on its heels, its arms flailing outward in a limbo maneuver Neo could be proud of. Then Asuka did what all good freedom fighters do when they find themselves outmatched by ludicrously overpowered machines.

She ran.

Finding Route Four should have been staggeringly easy, but redundant mountains of smoking debris and the remaining standing structures alternately robbed her of sure footing and clean sightlines, respectively. It should've been just a hop, skip and a jump to…

_That's it._

When the air at her back scintillated, her internal battery beeped and began to count down once more. _Good_, she told herself. An umbilical cable would only have hindered her as she stepped on a low structure to vault to the roof of a taller one. Light touched the lower building and it burned magnificently. The red mecha's face snapped to the northwest, to a thin white giant shed squatting defiantly in an aggregation of civil demolition; then to a closer building in the foreground.

Asuka ordered her doll to leap from her vantage point, which she knew without looking back was now burning magnificently. It was the Sixth Angel incident all over again, except that she was lily-padding skyscrapers instead of the U.N.'s Pacific fleet, and there was no perverted little boy wearing a female plug suit and fidgeting in her lap as she peered over his thin shoulder to laugh in the face of God's plan…

_I shouldn't be enjoying this_, she thought.

Then she had to jump again, somersaulting over frozen rope particle beams cutting past her and vaporizing a perfectly innocent cumulonimbus.

_Wait…I'm NOT._

"One kilometer, Asuka!" Misato said in the manner a youth-league basketball coach would encourage his team when they were down by thirty-four points with thirty-four seconds to go.

The Second Child touched down on a tower the instant energy blasts gutted its foundation, forcing her to depart its crumbling infrastructure and land on an already collapsing building. Her stomach dropped as her footing crumbled below. Asuka stumbled, unable to adjust course as she tumbled downward, crashing into the newly smoking debris of a third building. She grunted; it was like diving into a pile of jagged.

_Fuck_, he caught on. She couldn't get away with this anymore.

She didn't have to. She was there. "I'M HERE! OPEN IT!"

Asuka lunged and the door to Logistical Route Four slammed upward like a dozen locomotives. It revealed a black shape, broad at eye level while tapering to a round nose not unlike a dull spearhead, and layered with interlocking fire-scarred ebony tiles. The rectangular glass window jury-rigged a quarter of the way down from its top supported the nickname Nerv's engineers had given it: God's Welding Mask.

As Asuka stared at it from over seven hundred meters away, she knew there was no God, just a jerk with a tarnished trombone, going wah-_waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah_.

"Route _Four_, Asuka," Misato said. "Not Five."

The German teen could only groan and roll her machine onto its back, an action that afforded her an excellent view of Unit-01's crotch. It was everything above the crotch that worried her; a terrible thought trickled into her tired mind as her wide blue eyes wandered up past lanky, yet powerful arms crossed over the broad armored chest, the thick muscular neck, the gleaming slack jaw lined with steel teeth like the meshing gears of a clock tower, and lastly to the cold eyes shining like twin suns.

The thought was: _Shinji has never lost_.

Asuka Langley Sohryu could not rationalize away this fact anymore than she could increase her bust size by Zen-meditating in a bath of smelling salts and poinsettia seeds…n-not that she had ever tried. She had seen the vids of his encounters with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Angels. She had sortied with him to successfully take down the Sixth and Seventh, Ninth and Tenth. Oh, she had defeated the Eighth Angel all by herself…and would have died had _he_ not jumped into a live volcano to save her.

Asuka had been ambivalent when Kaji had kissed Shinji's scrawny ass for a week straight as they steamed to Japan on the Over the Rainbow. But now the man's words echoed around her head; he had defeated _two_ Angels, all alone, with little or no prior training. The Third Child was like a champion boxer that suffered a flash knockdown only to inevitably rise, get serious, and then pummel his poor challenger into bloody submission. It was not always pretty –it _never_ was, in fact- but the result was always the same.

Shinji Ikari wins. Shinji Ikari _always_ wins.

Shinji Ikari was Ender _Fucking_ Wiggin.

Asuka should have been terrified, drowning in despair, but fear and hopelessness were mere satellites orbiting something infinitely more massive.

She was angry.

It wasn't fair, at all. It just wasn't. She trained for years to get this good; he trained for weeks. She lost her mother forever _years_ ago; until today, he had a small piece of his own mom in the palm of his hand, whispering in his ear in the blue-black of his lovely suite. She had broken it, had a very good reason, and he didn't even want to hear it. Even now he stood over her, ready to smoke her like some ant under a magnifying glass. And he didn't care. She had poured her heart out to him, and he didn't care…

Did he?

Asuka Langley Sohryu thought, and spoke. "It isn't fair, Shinji. You're going to do this, and I can't even see your face."

There was silence, and nothing, then a chime, and he was there. For a minute turbulent cobalt blue mechanically roamed her as though there were infrared scanners implanted in his retinas. She knew better, and knew this was going to work.

"Misato," she said, her tone pillow-soft. "Switch off visuals for a sec."

"_What?_"

"Misato…"

Asuka did not miss the silent plea as her guardian's image collapsed on itself. The red head cupped the wrist of one hand with the other and rubbed the pressurization ring on her plug suit.

"So what happens when you talk me out of blasting you? You're going to tell me you were the one that put my cello in the furo, stuck a sail on it and carved 'H.M.S. Dork' in the wood?"

_Thank Gott. He still thinks PenPen did it._

"I'm not going to talk. We're past that." Her thumb found a crease in the small plastic, a section of the ring that felt spring loaded. She depressed the button and watched him watch the snug contours loosen on her skin. "But there's no way in hell I'm letting you beat me, Third."

"That's what I liked so much about you, why I looked up to you. Quitting's never an option, is it? Not like me. You _never_ run away. You…"

He tried, but ultimately failed at hiding the lump in his throat as her hands went to the fringes of her suit collar and lightly tugged. His starving eyes seemed almost to throb when she slowly…_slowly_…shucked the red neoprene from her slim, round shoulders. Shinji had to shake his head just to be able to talk again. He cares. This was going to work.

"You should've ran away today, Asuka. What other choices are there?"

"Here's two of them," and she showed him what they were as her hands violently ripped the front of her plug suit away from her lithe body, baring to him a perfectly-

"Nice sports bra."

Yes. Yes, it was a very nice sports bra.

The one she just _had_ to break in today.

Plan B.

"FREEBIES!" Asuka yelled, launching Unit-02's foot at and connecting with the Test Type's purple groin. He predictably screamed as his liquid HUD wobbled.

She commanded Unit-02 to propel itself from beneath him, to stand and sprint while she hoped and prayed. _His Eva isn't the ONLY thing that's purple, now_, she thought, inwardly smirking. The Second ignored the internal battery clock counting down to her doom. She would be at the shield in just a second. She'd have her defense and enough time to get to a power station…or to an extraction point-

_NO. His ass is MINE…somehow._

She dare not look at him, but she realized the boy was no longer screaming, just making seething, angry noises, _focused_ noises…

It was about then Asuka decided leaping for the shield was a good idea. She soared, landed, and then skidded into the steel base of Depot Four, without delay ripping her salvation from its latches to meet the retribution bearing down on her at the speed of light. The German pilot barely felt the beams shove against the black wall before they bounced off and careened into the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and then harmlessly into the endless chasm of deep space, far, far away…

* * *

"Are you alright? What's wrong?"

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. You'd better get on with your exercises."

* * *

Never in Asuka Langley Sohryu's life had she wanted so badly to say, 'It's on _now_, SUCKA!'

So she did.

Shinji did not seem amused, if the way he kept trying to murder her was any indication. Too bad for him. She had some things to say to him, and she only had two minutes and fifty-one, fifty, forty-nine seconds to say them.

"You idiot!" she scolded, lunging behind an apartment bloc as something behind her became a million degrees, "You still can't figure out why I broke that piece of junk, _can_ you?"

"BECAUSE YOU'RE A COLDHEARTED MISERABLE BITCH WHO CAN'T STAND OTHER PEOPLE BEING HAPPY AROUND HER!"

_That's NOT fair…_

His ignorance generated the white-hot ball of fury in the pit of her roiling stomach; the half truth in his words allowed her to focus on the ball, and either dodge his deadly light or deflect it with her black barrier. She closed in on his form now, Unit-02 holding the shield with one hand, her prog knife poised to strike behind it as though she were a Roman gladiator.

"YOU'RE FINISHED, SHINJI! NOW SHUT UP AND LISTEN BECAUSE I'M NOT GONNAAARRR_RRKKK_…"

He did not so much tell her to shut up as he did choke off her words with the hard purple claw that tore through the shuttle shield as though it were wet tissue. Her breath found her only as she reached the apex of her flight above Tokyo-3, courtesy of Air Shinji. Didn't he ever get tired of throwing her? Wasn't there any place in this city that was soft to land on? Was there any place on her body it _wouldn't_ hurt if Unit-01 charged her horn-first and gored her Eva…

Asuka's second instincts scanned each and every one of her catalogued martial skills, instructing her hands to clasp Unit-01's protrusion while her feet crashed into its ribcage. The red giant kicked upward with all its might and added to its attacker's own momentum.

At last, it was Shinji's turn to fly.

Unit-02 wheeled onto its stomach and rose just in time for Asuka to see her opponent land with an earth-jarring thud in the center of Tokyo-3 International Zoo (fortuitously crushing a bronze statue erected in the memory of Explody the Suicide Donkey, a Kerosene-swilling beast of burden that rammed a C-4-laden van commandeered by animal rights extremists attempting to 'liberate' Ling Ling Ling, the world's only recorded three-testicled Panda).

A grey boulder from one of the exhibits he landed on plunked him in the head. It was a boulder he obviously took exception to as Unit-01 snatched it and shot to standing.

"FUCK YOU, DUMBO!" Shinji spat over the com. "YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME?" Asuka watched as the giant then reared back…_baaaaaack_…and follow through as it hurled the rock far…_faaaaaaaar_…over the horizon. Shinji stood frozen in profile as if admiring his…HE'S OPEN!

_That was odd_, Asuka absently thought as she rushed him_, I could've sworn I heard trumpeting._

* * *

Ritsuko jumped as Maya screamed. "NO! SERGEANT TRUMPY!"

"We lost our tracking station on Mount Futago so we can't keep up with objects moving faster than Mach eighteen," Hyuga said. "Caspar predicts Sergeant Trumpy's present course as a south-southwesterly trajectory and his location as somewhere over the East Sea." He shook his head. "Someone in Jiangxi Province China's going to have a _real_ bad day."

"Sergeant Trumpy," Maya sobbed. "_Why?_ You were so full of life and peanuts…"

* * *

She didn't even give him time to look at her before her colossal red fist collided with the cold purple carapace in a shower of sparks, again and again. Once more. Then again. Another for good luck. One for Rei. Hmm…she seemed to be enjoying this.

One opening. That was all she had needed. She was in his guard now, and no Mr. Fantastic appendages or optical beam weaponry was going to get her out of it. As he grabbed her wrists and began to grapple, the eyes in question ignited. Asuka knew instantly only a second and the wrong decision stood between her and the** Worst Tan Ever **©.

A second passed.

Unit-02 stopped resisting the enemy, allowed him to surge forward and past like a crashing wave…wrenching his arm so that the ventilated shield at the crook of his elbow floated between her and the eyes shining with barely-contained power…

Blinding light exploded behind the black buffer, and when the Third Child screamed the girl's eyes darted to the feed from his entry plug. Relief and dread and elation and guilt and maternity crashed down on her as he clutched the top of his head and roared in pain.

As Evangelion Unit-01 mirrored him and slowly sank to the ground, Asuka, for the slightest moment, also felt pity.

Then it was gone.

"YOU'RE RIGHT, SHINJI! I WAS BEING SELFISH! YOU SPENT ALL THAT TIME FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF AND THAT THING WAS _YOUR_ CRUTCH! WHERE WAS _MY_ CRUTCH? WHY DIDN'T YOU EVER PAY ATTENTION? WHY DIDN'T YOU EVER LOOK AT ME? WHY DIDN'T YOU HOLD ME? _TOUCH_ ME? WHY DIDN'T YOU _TRY_? ONCE?"

Shinji didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Asuka could see the symbiotic pain drain from him as his shoulders rose and sank with his increasingly even breaths. Finally, beaten, subdued, domesticated, he was forced to listen to her. He was forced to think, to understand.

Finally, Shinji Ikari understood.

"I don't understand."

* * *

"Dr. Akagi," Maya called, wiping at puffy eyes, "you need to see this."

The woman in question was immediately at her sniffling protégé's side. As she stared at the Second Child's psychograph, the full-blown migraine that had been threatening to slam into her brain did just that.

"Sempai…why does it say 'LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa'?"

* * *

Asuka didn't hear herself screaming. She didn't notice Shinji's wide eyes suffusing with lucidity attainable only when one is staring at the abyss of their own imminent death. The mental order for Unit-02 to reach behind its back and grip the haft of something that shouldn't be there only registered subconsciously, filed under 'things to remember when Asuka Langley Sohryu returns from holiday'."

She didn't take inventory of her rapidly shifting center of gravity as Unit-02 pulled the thing that shouldn't be there from a place that shouldn't exist, and swung it over its head in a screaming arc, its fingers laced around the handle (on which was engraved 'Hurt Baka _Now_' in flaming kanji).

* * *

Over the audio feed in Central Dogma there was a deafening **CRACK**, not unlike a thunderclap in the inner ear. When after five minutes the static had cleared, the dust had settled, and the lightning had dissipated, Evangelion Unit-02 stood, slouched at the epicenter of concentric shocks even now rumbling through neighboring prefectures.

"Unit-02's energy reserves are depleted," Maya said.

"What about Shinji?" Ritsuko heard Misato query.

The young tech's eyebrows rose. "The pilot's life signs are stable even though Unit-01 has gone silent." Maya's terminal presented her with new information, and she cringed as if she had walked past week-old road kill. "Way, _way_ silent."

"That," Misato began, "is a Big. Fuck. Mallet."

Ritsuko could not deny this, and nodded. "Thank God we hired that Tendo girl."

* * *

Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything: Episode IV, Revenge of the Attack of the Return of the Phantom Epilogue Strikes Back…A Holiday Special

"My head hurts."

"So does mine. And my neck, my back, my arms, my p…special no-no place."

"Your…your what?"

"I just don't get it. Your mom was a world-class scientist. So is your dad, and he _runs_ Nerv. How could you have turned out so dense?"

"I'm not. I just… I think I didn't want to believe you."

"Why?"

"Because I'm pathetic, that's why. You should know that, you remind me every chance you get."

"When did I ever-"

"Do you want me to write you a list?"

"I don't think you're gonna be writing anything with that straight jacket on."

"I forgot…whose fault is it I have a straight jacket on in the first place?"

"_Look_, I only said all those things to get you to pay attention to me…don't you see that, now?"

"Wha…no! Why would I? How's that obvious? What kind of sense does that even make? You should've just been _nice_-"

"Well, I don't do nice, okay? Nice is what happens when you can't deal with the real world and you put on a happy face so people won't see you as a threat. I can't relate to nice."

"Then you can forget about relating to me. That's just how I deal with the world, and if you can't accept that…then you can just go _die_."

"You _do_ realize that wasn't very nice, don't you?"

"I guess that's just me trying to relate to _you_."

"Which pretty much proves that you weren't serious about the dying part."

"I'm really that easy to read?"

"No. But I pretend you are…and that's why you love me."

"Are…are you being ironic?"

"I wish."

"Are you _crying_?"

"No. You're seeing things. I never cry. Ever."

"I …think I get it, now. I do."

"Good. Now, get this itch on my back for me."

"H-how am I supposed to do that?"

"You _have_ a chin. Use it."

* * *

He sat, and only watched long enough to see his son awkwardly lean in until his naked chin nudged the Second Child between her shoulder blades. When Shinji noogied Asuka Langley Sohryu and her face showed undying gratitude, Gendo Ikari flicked the video feed to their white cell off. As the kiosk folded seamlessly into the ebony surface of his desk, he steepled his gloved hands.

A wizened, powerful voice behind him rippled through the black expanse of his gigantic office until it seemed as though many people were speaking the same words at staggered and infrequent intervals. "Unusually benevolent for Nerv's Supreme Commander, allowing those two to share a cell until the Third Child's extradition."

It was only by the grace of Ikari's respect for Kouzou Fuyutski (born from a promise made to his late wife and nurtured through a decade of professional camaraderie) that Gendo did not snort at the older man's assumption. Also, Fuyutski was right. That _was_ benevolent. He was slipping.

"He should enjoy the peace he currently enjoys with the Second Child. By this time tomorrow his world will be significantly more unpleasant."

Commander Ikari could, in his mind's eye, see his wife's teacher nodding sagely over his shoulder. "Of course. One can only expect the most severe of retribution when one has wrought the level of carnage so brazenly perpetrated…no matter how irreplaceable one is."

Ho ho. "I assure you that Unit-01 will be operational, irrespective of the Third Child's operational capacity…or lack thereof. Do you not agree, sensei?"

"I need no convincing," the sub-commander assured his (subtly chaffing) superior. "I have no doubt that Unit-01 will perform adequately, that she'll unfailingly accept the dummy plug under any and all extenuating circumstances, regardless of the fact that Ritsuko Akagi has not completed the prototype and has no real world data to validate its effectiveness, and that if Unit-01 does not activate in the midst of an Angel attack, we would only have one other pilot that has emerged victorious in one-on-one combat against an Angel, one only minutes matured from an inert, harmless embryo, and that Units-03 and 04 are still under construction with no currently assigned pilots whom, when found, it will take months to adequately train, and mentally prepare for the inevitable onslaught from an enemy that has become increasingly more powerf-"

"A simple 'no' would have sufficed."

"Tell me, Ikari…just who _is_ your daddy?"

* * *

"What's that face for? Don't worry about Shinji. From what I'm hearing now he's only going to spend some quality time in the psychiatric ward. For now, at least. He and Asuka will be evaluated for the next week. No one seems to think Shinji is going to face any charges."

Ritsuko truly believed her own words. She had first asked about the fate of the Third Child when she had met earlier with Commander Ikari, who had uncharacteristically muttered like a petulant child…something about old fart know-it-alls. The blonde woman put the cubed root of five-thousand and thirty-two together with the hyperbolic tangent of the cosine of sixteen radians and realized Shinji Ikari's mother had saved her son again.

More than a decade after her 'death', Yui Ikari still had such a hold on everything in Nerv that mattered, and that included Kouzou Fuyutski. Something incessantly vile lanced through her when she thought of the woman who, no matter how hard Ritsuko Akagi tried ignoring it, was _everywhere_. She wanted desperately at that moment to forget about Yui, so she turned her black thoughts away from Commander Ikari's wife, to finish her teleconference with…Rei Ayanami.

Ritsuko could only shiver internally at the red eyes staring out at her from that tousled blue mop. It wasn't apathy in those bloody pools that frightened her; it was the concern, a thing so painfully understated a woman unfamiliar with the First Child's face would have mistook it for confusion. Or perhaps constipation. But it was there. It was new. It was creepy. It was something Commander Ikari need not know about, lest Shinji's current status as 'alive' was to remain unchanged.

"That is good for him," the First Child said, her image briefly flickering before stabilizing in the briefing room Ritsuko, Misato, and the technicians currently occupied. "I am glad."

"You could probably visit him tomorrow if you like, if you're feeling good enough to move around."

The chill in Dr. Akagi's spine deepened, because _now_ Rei looked almost…hesitant? "I…I will consider it."

"You don't need to feel nervous around Asuka," said the blonde woman as she quickly grasped the source of Rei's apprehension…and then pounced on it like a jaguar. "Ever since she and Shinji made up she's been as gentle as a kitten."

Rei's nostrils flared, tried hiding it, utterly failed.

"As long as you don't make any passes at Shinji, you won't have to worry about getting into a cat fight."

For a moment, Rei Ayanami looked for all the world as though she was consulting someone that wasn't there. Then, with the premeditation of a master brain surgeon, raised the arm that was not in a sling, and then slowly, precisely, extended her middle finger from her closed fist.

The briefing room video projector went black.

Behind where Ritsuko sat, Misato Katsuragi stared, finally re-hinging her jaw when she realized it was hanging open. "Wow, Ritsu. I guess that proves even Rei has her limits."

Dr. Akagi shook her head and fully swiveled in her seat to meet the gaze of her best and most annoying friend. "The only thing it proves is that this day needs to end as soon as possible, so I'd like to get this meeting started before it has a chance to get any weirder. Maya, why did you take off your uniform?"

The young short-haired woman in question looked down at her t-shirt, which was faded, and judging from the stretching in the chest area perhaps two sizes too small. Pulled taut over her breasts were the words 'Trumpy's Troops' in a large bold font, making Ritsuko's protégé look all the world like a sorority girl gone wild who had spent spring break at the Nairobi Wildlife Refuge.

"I-I apologize, sempai. I just wanted to honor Sergeant Trumpy's sacrifice."

Ritsuko was incredulous. "What? _What_ sacrifice? What did he accomplish by being thrown into mainland China? He was just. An _elephant_. What the hell was he even sergeant of?" She loudly sighed. "Can you at least take off that ridiculous hat?"

Maya Ibuki's trembling digits fingered the foam elephant trunk drooping slightly over her forehead. Her lower lip quivered…

"Okay, _okay_! You don't have to take it off…" She couldn't stand yelling at her kohai anymore; it was like kicking a puppy…a puppy with diseases. "Just, just give us your update of the damage report; it's already past twenty-three hundred hours."

The younger woman was visibly relieved as she primped the stack of papers she loosely gripped. "No new information about the Eva's, I'm afraid. Unit-00 sustained the heaviest damage. Repairs will begin tomorrow on the left and right side of its…everything. Unit-02 incurred only slight damage in the head area, as well as the neck and back. Intermediate damage was sustained in the groin region. Unit-01 is almost entirely unharmed, save for the head, of course."

Maya looked up and into Ritsuko's green eyes. "I talked to the engineers in person. They're really at a loss as to how to remove the Progressive Mallet from Unit-01's crown, let alone how to get it back into Hammer Space."

Her superior waved a hand at that. "They asked you to put that last part in there, didn't they? Well, I don't have a clue how to do that, they're on their own."

"I _do_ have some good news about Tokyo-3. The first teams from the Civil Planning Department came back, and they're saying the city only really sustained moderate damage to its infrastructure."

Misato looked up at that, mildly surprised. "So it's _not_ as bad as it looks?"

Lieutenant Ibuki shuffled her paper stack until she came to the appropriate page. "If you break it down by district, the destruction was usually in the range of thirty-one to thirty-eight percent. District thirty-six was almost entirely untouched, at two percent, while district twenty-seven was totaled, ninety-three percent. That includes the Mimura Third Man Sports Complex, the Tokyo-3 book and gaming sectors, and…" Maya blinked. Her eyes became liquid bowling balls as she inhaled shakily. "…and the Tokyo-3 International Zoo, where…_where_…"

And then the waterworks came.

Ritsuko could only shake her head as Lieutenant Maya Ibuki sprawled over the conference table and soaked her status report in what looked like pints of liquid. Misato rolled her seat over to the distraught woman's side, laying a comforting hand on the back of Maya's neck. "Oh, there, there. It's okay. Let it all out." The hand moved to the base of Maya's skull. "Just go home for the night and rest that sad brain of yours."

Ritsuko Akagi just threw her hands up. "Yeah, Major Katsuragi's right. Go ahead. You're not going to be any good if you're fiddling with Caspar and you start bawling about dead elephants."

Maya wiped at her wet eyes as she finally sat up and nodded, giving a sloppy salute before picking up her now squishy analysis and turning toward the exit.

"Well, so much for our update," said Ritsuko when her kohai had finally escaped the briefing room with a drunken shamble. She turned to Misato. "So what're you doing now?"

"I…am getting hammered."

"Ah, the bar."

"Kaji."

And suddenly Makoto Hyuga burst into tears and hurriedly dashed to the door.

"Hyuga!" Misato yelled after him. "For God sake, it was just a dirty joke!" She looked apologetically at her college buddy. "Why do I feel obligated to calm him down?"

"I guess you're just that nice a girl."

The violet-haired woman rubbed her neck as if she had strained it, and then motioned with a head nod to the door. "Yeah. Look, I'll see you tomorrow. And sorry for the whole trying-to-shoot-you-in-the-stomach thing earlier."

"I almost wish you succeeded," and Ritsuko immediately made a face as she realized how truly morbid that sounded. As she waved to Misato, she began to feel that this place was finally getting to her. That was because she heard more crying, even though the room was now empty, and she was fairly certain it wasn't her. She compared her mental inventory of those who had entered the room with those that had left, then sighed and muttered something about crybaby bridge bunnies.

Ritsuko Akagi bent over slightly at the waste as she looked down and past the edge of the table, beneath it. "Aoba? Aoba, is that you?"

"Uh-huh." He sniffled like a four-year old.

Well, she couldn't yell at him anymore than she could yell at Maya the elephant girl. "What's the matter?" she softly, sweetly asked, kneeling all the way down so that she was at eye level with his huddled form.

He sniffed again and pulled his knees closer to his chest. "Nuthin'."

"Are you sad?"

"…Yeah."

"Why are you sad?"

He shrugged. "Don't know."

"Are you sad because Maya and Hyuga are sad?"

He shook his head and rubbed his snotty nose and pouted.

"Are you sad because Shinji and Asuka were mad? 'Cause you know they're not in that much trouble…"

"No…"

Hmm. "Are you mad because I tried choking the life out of you in a fit of primal rage?"

He nodded.

"Well, I'm sorry. And I'm not mad anymore."

Much to the woman's relief, his sniffling began to subside. "Y-you're not mad?"

"Nope! And here…" Ritsuko fished in a pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a green lollipop. "You like Jolly Ranchers?"

He looked at it guardedly and blinked. "Is it…is it sour apple?"

"Well, is there any other kind?" she asked motherly. "You can have it if you come out from under there."

Only a second passed before he gently grabbed the sucker from her soft hand. Ritsuko pulled back as he crawled out and stood, hands fidgeting at the fringes of the plastic wrapper. She also stood, but with a soft grunt.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm fine. Just getting old, I think. Now run along home, okay?"

"See you tomorrow?"

She beamed. _I'm beaming. I'm actually beaming_. "Tomorrow."

He responded with a smile of his own, and he very nearly skipped out of the conference room, humming some poor tune while enjoying his candy treat.

Ritsuko Akagi finally sagged with relief.

At last, at long last, she was alone.

And she could finally cry for Sergeant Trumpy.

* * *

One month later…

Shinji watched Misato eye the meaty chunks in her bowl, poked them with her chopsticks, and then looked up to eye the First Child with a raised, but kind brow. "Rei, I thought you didn't like meat."

"I do not. However, it was…kind of you to invite me to your apartment for dinner. Assisting Pilot Ikari in preparing the food is not appropriate compensation?"

The young man budged slightly in his seat at the table as Asuka threw her hands up and bumped into him; it was easy, seeing how closely she was sitting to him. "Do you _ever_ listen to yourself talk, First? 'Compensation'? You make it sound like some dowry."

"It does not surprise me that you are knowledgeable in methods of compensation. I do not know how else to explain why Shinji tolerates your company."

"Oooooooooooooooooh," Misato helpfully instigated between mouthfuls of food, "_burn_."

Shinji could feel his girlfriend's shoulder tense, though her face remained tenuously placid. "Very funny, Rei. I'm not mad at you. I kinda like having you this way, to be honest. I feel much better knowing that when the next Angel comes, I won't have some _pussy_ covering my back."

It became clear in the time that had passed that there were at least three things that you most certainly did _not_ do in Post-Postal Shinji Nerv. You did not offer to share your bag of peanuts with Lieutenant Maya Ibuki. Poor Aoba. You did not eat the last of the Butter Pecan ice cream in the dining hall unless you were certain that the Supreme Commander already had his fill. Poor Aoba.

And above these, most importantly, you did not, under any circumstances, whisper a word pertaining to cats with Rei Ayanami in the immediate vicinity, immediate being eight kilometers.

"So, _Shinji_," Misato loudly interjected, trying as he and Asuka were to ignore the blue glowing wisps convecting from Rei's frozen form, "your session today, how'd it go? Are you less crazy than you were yesterday?"

He shrugged, discreetly inching from Rei's growing aura of canned whup-ass. "I think Dr. Ueto's advice is helping. As long as I find an outlet for the things that bother me, I'll be okay. It's easy now. Sometimes," he laughed, perturbed at how uneven it sounded even after four weeks of therapy. "Sometimes I vent and I don't think I even realize it."

"Oh…" was all Misato could say at first. "Well, everyone at Nerv has got your back, this time. Asuka's not the only one that cares about you, and as long as you remem-" And then Misato Katsuragi's face tried collapsing on itself. Her hands went to her stomach, which began making…noises. "Oh…_God_, my…what exactly are we _eating_?"

"Just some stuff that was sitting around. It was still good, a little bland, so I put some shichimi-"

His guardian's eyes flew open at the mention of the spice, "I-I thought I told you I…can't h-handle…" The table rocked upward on two legs as she pushed away and stumbled from it. _She can bob for apples in a bathtub of one-hundred proof moonshine but she can't take shichimi?_ Shinji thought, tracking Misato shuffle to the bathroom like a grandmother hopped up on pixie straws.

"You weren't kidding about subconsciously venting, were you?" Asuka asked, turning away from Misato as the woman devoted one hand to clasping her rear end before tearing open the shoji to the restroom. Rei, no longer glowing, silently chewed her noodles.

"At least I didn't do it on purpose."

"IT'S _EVERYWHERE_!" Misato screamed. "I DON'T REMEMBER EATING _THAT_…"

The German pursed her lips and nodded approvingly. "Well, I'm sure she appreciates that, Shinji."

"IT WON'T STOP COMING! IT'S LIKE THAILAND ALL OVER AGAIN!"

"I hope not…I worked pretty hard on this one."

"It shows," Asuka said after swallowing another bite. He was happy she was enjoying it. He wanted it to be the best penguin she had ever tasted.

_That'll learn'em to mess with my cello…_

The End

A/N: Wow…that was kinda long. Oh well. Thanks to everyone for reading and reviewing. This was a much harder story than In the Dark Room, if only for the fact that I did not know whether or not I could make people laugh. As of this writing, exactly twice the number of people has read this story that has read ITDR. Funny what a little humor will do. It probably also has a lot to do with the facts that this story has no ACC's, and has a significant portion of it devoted to Rei. And on that note…

I know that Rei had very little play in this chapter. I know…I _know_…

I want people to consider the following, and here I am assuming that Rei lovers are by extension, Asuka haters. Not an all encompassing assumption, but I'm using it, nonetheless:

No part of the story was told in Asuka's perspective until the second chapter. Until the third chapter, Rei had more airtime, and a significant portion of the humor was devoted to her character. On top of that, she gets to put the screws to Asuka, and then gets the opportunity to rub her vengeance in the face of the German. And by the end of the chapter two Shinji was still skull-fucking the city. That shit…needed to be _resolved_. Besides, the story is Shinji Just Snaps and Totally Wales on Everything, not Rei Ayanami: Queen of the Deadpan Quip.

And the two scenes in the Epilogue with Rei were not planned for originally. I put them there because I know how popular she is, despite the voice in my head telling me not write them. I won't make a habit of this, but the story has been fairly popular, readers have been very nice, and I wanted to thank them.

Random A/N: I am waiting for someone to give me an excuse to parody the SHIT out of pairings. Please, give me a reason.

**Thousands of animals were harmed in the making of this fic.**

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

Next Project: Normal to Reality


End file.
